Bo was right; he was starting over. Very soon he was propelled into a seamless round of engagements. These included filming with the Rocky Horror Show for the movie Rockula; teaming up with his friend Bo Jackson again for an appearance on "Sesame Street"; then A & E's Diamond Showcase. Then came the TV and radio talk shows: Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Joan Rivers.
And one day during this period of everlasting appearances, he found himself at the Manhattan studios of Infinity Broadcasting's K-Rock, where Howard Stern, the master of constructive cynicism, and his side-kick, Robin Quivers, the queen of cut-up, performed their customarily zany act of "snag-the-guest." But Bo had his own agenda: Howard: Hey Bo, Buddy Holly ripped you off--"Not Fade Away"--I bet you were glad when that plane went down?
Bo: Noooh.
Howard: You're not a bitter man? Interesting; I would be so bitter.
Robin: You always told me Bo Diddley was bitter.
Howard: That's true. I'm kinda disappointed he's not bitter. So, Robin, Bo says to me during the commercials, "You got any of those t-shirts?"
Robin: What t-shirts?
Howard: He needs twelve t-shirts, K-Rock t-shirts.
Bo: Grandkids!
Howard: So I said to him, "Wait a minute. Where am I gonna get twelve t-shirts?" Gary, ask Tom Chiosano, our General Manager, to come in here and tell me why I can't have twelve t-shirts for the great Bo Diddley. For his grandkids. See, Robin, I get embarrassed; I say, "Yes, we've got a t-shirt," and I'm thinking to myself, "Maybe I can scrounge up one t-shirt!" Let Tom tell Bo Diddley "No"!
Bo, you think the white man ripped you off--this is the whitest white man you're ever gonna meet! You think record company guys are bad. Wait till you see this guy; I wanna see you get a t-shirt out of him!
Bo: Huh?
Howard: Where is Tom?
Gary [Producer]: He's on his way right now. You're embarrassing Tom in front of the legend.
(Enter Tom Chiosano, fashion-plate general manager of K-Rock).
Howard: Tom, you wanna tell the black man why the white man is ripping him off. Go ahead! Now, can Bo Diddley get twelve t-shirts for his grand-children?
Tom (boldly): Yes! If we have ëem, he'll get ëem.
Bo: Amen!
Howard (disbelief): Really?
Jacky "the Joke Man" Martling: Howard, Tom must know he doesn't have them.
Howard: Bo, you're a sheriff; arrest this man!
Bo: Heh, heh! Tom. . . knows. . . Diddley!
Tom: This makes my morning. My wife is one of the biggest fans you've ever had.
Howard: Oh thank God, else you never would've gotten a T-shirt. Oh, Mrs. Chiosano loves you.
Tom: She said, "What? Only twelve; doesn't he need more?"
Howard: Yeah right! I can't get twelve shirts.
Bo: Howard, I just wanted to go back and clean up the back-yard where I threw trash a few minutes ago when I was talking [bad] about Japanese cars. I am a very big lover of Japanese automobiles, but I do love Lincoln-Continentals and Fords!
Howard: All right, Bo, everybody believes you now.
Robin: He's thought about the error of his ways.
Howard: Hey, Tom, come to think about it, forget about those twelve T-shirts!
Elsewhere Bo was the subject of major interviews in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Goldmine, and Rolling Stone, the latter complete with a photographic portrait by Richard Avedon.
Then came MCA's publication in both CD and album form of a major retrospective of his best work, The Chess Box: Bo Diddley, set off with interviews by Andy McKaie and an interpretive essay by Robert Palmer. Afterwards, MCA sweetened the pot even more with Bo Diddley: Rare and Well Done, a collection of sixteen alternate takes, fugitive items, and previously unreleased cuts dating from the years 1955 to 1968. This collection amounted to a spectacular corrective to some of the Chess omissions of these years (check out "Blues Blues," "Rock ëN' Roll," and "Moon Baby," all stunners).
Meanwhile Bo himself released his latest work on the Triple X label in an album entitled Breakin' Through the B.S. (featuring the admirable tracks "Down With the Pusher" and "I Broke the Chain," the latter much praised by Ron Wood). At the same time his classic tunes of the 50s and 60s were transcribed for a book of music instruction, prepared by Fred Sokolow for the Goodman Group, and published as Bo Diddley Guitar Solos.
And all the while there was music-making: club dates, festivals, concerts, a second and a third trip to Japan, a twentieth trip to Australia. There were also big gigs, like the Democratic Convention's Victory Party for Presidential Candidate Bill Clinton (an "equal-time measure" for having played the celebratory Ball for Young Americans in Washington D.C., at the Presidential Inauguration of George Bush, some three and a half years earlier). And Bo also appeared at the Olympian, three-day "Guitar Legends World Satellite Concert," from Seville, Spain, where he insisted on being accompanied by his bandleader, Debby Hastings.
"I believe I was the only woman performer there," says Debby. "But this was so typical of Bo. I remember that on the first night I ever played for him, back in ë84, he gave me a solo, pushed me right out in front, even though he didn't know me, and I thought, ëJeez, what a nice guy to want to share the spotlight. How unusual.' Then I learned that he had always been very supportive of female musicians."
Despite the eventually positive mood that these honors and activities inspired in Bo and his supporters, some in Bo's circle were worried. The focus of their concern was Bo's spending habits. As Bo had gradually accustomed himself through the 80s to life without Kay, his checkbook--which had previously been monitored by her--seemed from the day of her departure to have become a feeding ground for everyone in his entourage who had a hard-luck story or a perceived need. Bo's propensity for unconditional giving had its fruitful side in his continual benefit work, of course, but surrounded now in his homestead in Archer by a floating retinue of family and come-and-go free-loaders, often up to thirty strong, and with an often chaotic home-life as he and a few loyal advisers tried to put things in order, a formula for disaster was surely present.
Marty Otelsberg recognized this and often spoke to Bo on the phone about the situation. But some of his comments irritated Bo. "I don't mind getting people's input," he told some visiting friends, "but I want to be treated like an adult and not like a little kid."
Part of Bo's profligacy towards his kin had much to do with his childhood in war-time Chicago. Those had been tough years of disciplined denial while his family was on relief and where the only consolation had been the companionship provided by large numbers of aunts, siblings, and third or so cousins. To have been able to emerge from those hardships was a mark of honor with Bo. Here, fifty years later, he was re-creating that very same comfort given by an extensive family. For Bo, the more extensive the better, it seemed, for the ability to provide was a sign of his completeness, his manhood.
"To me, [the word] ëman' means a cat who is supposed to protect himself as well as his family, to put his life on the line for them," he once explained to author Michael Lydon. "Having the opportunity to be a husband, father, and provider is a good title, if you can live up to it."
"They talk about how generous Elvis was," observes Scott Smith, who along with Ronnie Haughbrook was then one of the few wage-earners in Bo's household,". . . how Elvis bought cars for everyone, how he let them live in the mansion. Bo is the same way. He is always providing for everyone around him. And it doesn't matter how many it is, he provides for them. He bought a piece of land for his housekeeper after her divorce. That's typical. If he can help, he will. His attitude is, ëWhat's to save for tomorrow? Tomorrow may never come.'"
But for Marty Otelsberg there were more sober implications. "When it comes to money, Bo and I are different kinds of people," he remarked shortly before his death. "I have few needs. "I'm a very conservative type of guy, and I invest my money carefully. But Bo hasn't done the same for himself. He lavishes his money on his family and friends, even though many of them don't appreciate that.
"But that's Bo Diddley, that's the way he is! And that's his prerogative--and you have to respect that. But it blows my mind all the same!"
Sadly, these remarks by Marty have eventually to be measured against the evidence presented in, and the decision reached by, the United States District Court in Los Angeles on June 10, 1994. Here, in a suit brought by Ellas McDaniel ("professionally known as Bo Diddley") against the Estate of Martin Otelsberg, the Court found after a three-day trial that "there was a breach of fiduciary duty on the part of Mr. Otelsberg" and that he had engaged in "wrongful diversion of funds." The Court awarded Bo immediate damages to the tune of over $400,000, to cover the years 1988 to 1992, with additional, "accounting to take place for the handling of [Bo Diddley's] trust account prior to 1988." When Bo's counsel, John Rosenberg of the Boston firm of Epstein, Becker & Green, indicated to the court that there existed a brokerage-house account with a value of up to half a million dollars that had not previously been revealed by the Estate, Judge Edward Rafeedie further enjoined the Otelsberg Estate "from transferring, hypothecating, or otherwise disposing of any assets . . . without the prior approval of the Court."
The breach of fiduciary duty was adjudged, then, to amount to quite a significant sum. Yet through the years Bo had always declared, "Whatever I have today, it's due entirely to Marty." What had gone wrong in this long and productive relationship?
"Yeah, I hated that it happened, y'know," says Bo. "It hurt me and saddened me to have to go out and prove that my manager had been quietly taking money from me. I let him handle that stuff because I didn't want my family plundering through it, y'know. But I had suspected something was wrong a little before Marty died. I hate to accuse anybody, so I hadn't quite settled on the date that I was gonna go to him and have ourselves a little discussion.
"Just from common-sense I knew something was wrong. How was it that from what I was making through the years I was always in trouble money-wise? I'd like make eighty thousand; I knew I'd spent ten of it, say, but now why am I in trouble already?
"One day I heard that Marty had cut Margo out of the Nike deal. Margo and TCI had been beautiful for me, and there was no question she was owed something because she had made the initial representation in Japan. This was just plain wrong. So I said to Marty, ëWhere's Margo's share?' He said, ëLoyalty only goes so far, Bo!' Can you dig it, she ain't getting nothin'! That shook me hard; I didn't say anything, just kept it to myself awhile, but that incident threw up a red flag for me, a flag ëbout as big as they fly on the top of the Kremlin!
"Then when Marty died, his Estate got nasty, refused to hand over the books for my accounts and my contracts and stuff; that's when I knew I needed two people with special skills: someone who knew figures, and someone who knew the law.
"See, if I had seen the shit myself, I couldn't have figured it out anyway. I had to have people who were into figures and stuff to tell me what was going on, and--and God love her--Faith Fusillo at TCI came through for me. Now as to lawyers, in the past I never had much luck with them trying to get back what belonged to me, like my royalties or the rights to my music, and I always kinda resented ëem, ëcos see, the lawyer ain't sang one damn note! But I got me a good one this time."
The interval preceding the trial posed some difficult times for those who knew both Bo and Marty, and who dealt with them on a daily basis. It was easy to sense the depth of Bo's convictions that he had been betrayed, but to have experienced Marty Otelsberg's buoyant nature and his personal warmth, not to mention his generosity, made it equally difficult to believe that he was capable of such serious breaches of trust as those charged.
"We didn't question the accuracy of any of the funds that Marty was handling for Bo," says Faith Fusillo, Vice President of Operations for TCI and Bo Diddley's current business manager.
"It wasn't until Mrs. Otelsberg attempted to have Bo buy out a management contract which we later learned she knew to be unenforceable--and which was so deemed by the American Arbitration Association--and when she wouldn't return his books and records, that Bo himself began to get truly suspicious. Since I had never questioned Marty's conduct at all--well, personally, it was difficult to go along with.
"But then Bo asked me to give him an idea of what his financial picture looked like from an objective basis. He would ask, ëHow much did I make in 1989, and what commission did Marty take?' At first we had only TCI's books and records to go by and very few of Marty's documents to compare them with. But then as we got further along in the litigation, we started to receive copies of Marty's accountings and the expense checks that were drawn against Bo's fiduciary account. It was at that point that it became apparent to me as I was doing the analysis that among other things Marty never took a commission check, and never wrote a check to Martin Otelsberg Management for work done on Bo's behalf.
"Instead--and this is exactly as the Judge stated it in his Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law--Marty paid a salary to his wife, made payments or loans to various other family members or friends, made payments to personal credit cards, and--and this the Judge found simply astonishing--even paid his pool man! All from Bo's fiduciary account, and, of course, none of this was proper.
"I think the weight of evidence was overwhelming; the Judge handed down his decision after a very short deliberation. And he also expressed the view that he thought the Estate's defense was contrived and that their testimony lacked credibility.
"Kay, Bo's ex-wife was there for the defense to attest to Marty's character. She made a strong statement, but her presence hurt Bo's feelings deeply, I believe, though he said nothing. But the point is that I think all of us associated with Bo could have been called to the stand to say how much we cared about Marty, and what a great guy we thought he was--and we could have said that without any dishonesty. But unfortunately his records spoke for themselves; it was as though he was there and testifying for himself, yet convicting himself with his own accounting methods. I think even Kay was astonished at the evidence after a while."
"I had a great team," says Bo. "My attorney, John Rosenberg, did a heck of a job. He's a former guitar player, and we've got plans to jam together. And then there was Faith: she analyzed the situation inside out. She was commended by the Judge for tracking everything down. We had an expert witness standing by from the accounting field, but after Faith's testimony the Judge said they'd be no need to call him.
"Yep, it was Marty's own figures that hurt him, not mine! We didn't have to do nothin' but figure out what went where, and what didn't go where it shouda! Right now we're in the process of signing a settlement agreement for the years prior to 1988--I'm not allowed to discuss the exact amount--but I'm pleased with the sum.
"Tell you one thing about Marty, he was great at watching my taxes, never did let me fall behind or anything like that like some artists, but now I gotta pay Uncle Sam on what they awarded me. I feel vindicated, but this might end up a real costly affair!"
In the midst of this stunning episode Bo was also meeting with his biographer, the long-time fan, to log some of life's inevitable passages. Momma Ethel had passed on in her eighty-fifth year at her home in Magnolia, Mississippi. "I knew I was gonna lose her," said Bo somberly. "And everyone in my family was on my case ëcos I didn't go to the funeral. But how could I? How could I look at my mother in that box? I wanted to remember her sittin' happily in a chair--like I'm sittin' here now--talkin' up a storm, and acting just like a youngster, like she always did. Kenneth stood there for me and explained to everybody why I couldn't be there.
"Momma Ethel and Momma Gussie! Whew--together they pushed me to obedience, man, and good manners. They made a man out of me, no doubt about it. What a pair of ladies!
"Say, you know Sylvia and me got hitched! Yeah, back in September of ë93. Heh, heh!"
"We were living in Albuquerque," said Sylvia, with amused delight, "and one day we just got up and drove to Las Vegas together and got married. When we came back, each of us went to our own house, and never even told our children about it! Not for a while."
"When we moved to Florida, I told Bo the first thing he had to do was to put down a cement driveway!"
"That's all done now," she adds, with Bo chuckling in the background. "And we have a new triple-wide trailer; lots more room. Things are quieter there now."
Bo and the writer knew they were coming toward the end of their project. The writer would read chunks of material to Bo. Bo would rest on a sofa in his hotel room, his elbow on a pillow, his head propped on his palm. He would be absorbed, fascinated by some of the details the writer had presented. "You found out things about me I never knew myself," he joked.
It was time to finish. The writer wondered if all had been said: had they omitted anything of importance in this account of Bo's life? Of all the events, over all of the years, was there any one episode that stood out, that had more meaning for Bo, or presented a sharper memory than any other? Could his sensational 1994 guest appearance on the Rolling Stones' "Hoodoo-U-Voodoo" pay-per-view, or his 1996 Mike Vernon-produced A Man Among Men CD with contributions from Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Richie Sambora, and Jimmie Vaughan, be regarded as capstones to a cup-runneth-over decade? For sure, these great events made him feel "ten foot tall," suggested Bo, but if there was one thing of importance that he had not mentioned, then it had to be the Welcome Home Parade of June 10, 1991, when he and other celebrity guests Brooke Shields, Evander Holyfield, and Paul Sorvino drove in open jeeps down Broadway in Lower Manhattan alongside the heroes and heroines of Desert Storm, through the ticker-tape, through the cheers.
"Everyone in the parade received a great welcome and I don't suppose mine was greater than anybody else's, but it stunned me, man. I couldn't believe the ovation when I came out of the reception at the Downtown Club near the Battery to ride in the jeep with Sergeant Mullins of the U.S. Army. I was proud to be an American. In fact, that day I felt like I was the proudest American alive.
"And it's strange, but I couldn't help thinking of a time twenty or more years ago when I was doing a concert at a college in Washington, D.C., and soldiers came in and shut down the concert and gave us ten minutes to get out. There was a riot going on outside, and they said, ëYou'd better get out of here.' And before we knew it, before we had a chance to break down the equipment, we were covered all over in salt-and-pepper gas, and they were wielding nightsticks all over the place. It was holy hell. And that was such a daggone time to be an American, to see Americans fighting among themselves, and to be caught up in it.
"But in Desert Storm we were dealing with an outside force, an aggressor. And we were together as a nation, and so it felt so good to be waving at all those millions of people, and to be honoring the Army and all those men and women in the Services. For once, we seemed to be putting all our differences aside. We oughta see the lesson in that."
"But check this out--and now I'm gonna surprise you, tell you something maybe you didn't know. You ask the U.S. Army or the U.S. Marines if the Bo Diddley Beat will survive!
"I guarantee you if everyone else forgets me when I'm dead and gone, those dudes will remember me!"
The U.S. Army? The U.S. Marines?
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, lies on a flat and somewhat less than fruited plain, about 20 miles south of the city of Hopkinsville. It is the home of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. The 101st Airborne is the outfit that made it into the military record books in Operation Desert Storm by covering more territory during combat in less time than any other unit in the annals of warfare. Fort Campbell is a place of tough preparation for the thousands of young men and women who pass through it on their way to better lives, or to Infinity. But it seems an unlikely place for safeguarding the reputation and eventual memory of one of the founders of rock and roll.
Unlikely, that is, until on a spring day you witness emerging from far-off, beyond the clutter of military buildings and the "grinders" or drilling grounds, a group of male inductees jogging towards your position on the outskirts of the camp.
They make a dramatic sight, these men. They run in formation four abreast and in a column some twenty deep. Their heads appear scalped. They are dressed in what looks like underwear--khaki t-shirts or singlets, yellow boxer shorts--and in hi-top boots. On their backs they carry packs of monstrous size.
From a distance you can see their feet rhythmically pounding the ground and sending up puffs of dust. As they jog they sing, one man in the company calling out the lines, the others responding in unison. The caller's voice is high and emphatic, in contrast to the flat, deep-throated roar that comes from the rest of the phalanx:
"H-e-ey Bo Diddley, where you bin'?" he calls.
"Downtown Brooklyn drinking gin!" comes the massed reply.
"What you gonna do when you get back?"
"Burn it all out on the PT track!"
The rhythm is crucial: like marching, running in the military is done in cadence and the caller begins a new sentence only when the left foot hits the ground.
They come on. As they pound by, the earth begins to shake as though some momentous, unnatural event were in progress. And all the while the men press on with their hearty invocation of the name and rhythms of Bo Diddley.
"Hey Bo Diddley, haven't you heard?
I'm gonna jump from an iron bird.
And if my main don't open wide
I've got a re-serve by my side.
And if that one should fail me too,
Look out below, I'm comin' through!
If I die on the old Drop Zone,
Box me up and ship me home:
Pin my wings upon my chest,
Bury me in the ëLeaning Rest'!"
As the column thunders on, the music they create with only feet and voices as instruments has all the ingredients of a World Beat. These dusty figures might be a group of primeval warriors trotting home across the plains after the hunt, or perhaps a troupe of unflagging Maori bent on some mysterious ritual.
But these men are paratroopers in training, an ethnic cross-section of young America, stoically preparing themselves for their military duty in some distant desert or jungle, and, as they pass from sight, they leave behind them on the air the faint, imperishable strains of "Hey Bo Diddley".
It's all so obvious now. To really know Diddley, you have to know what Bo knows: that his legacy is in safe hands, that his Beat goes on.